VANCOUVER, B.C. -- This beautiful city deserves a Stanley Cup and it certainly feels like the chalice will be delivered sometime soon.
It's not as incomprehensible as the Rules of Golf or even what constitutes a sand trap at Whistling Straits, but it is a bit confusing that there are two hockey summits on the calendar this month in Toronto.
TORONTO (AP) -- The Hockey Hall of Fame is no longer just for male inductees.
In the end, it was a suspension of disbelief. There was no red light behind the goal, no signal from the closest referee. Blackhawk teammates jumped over the bench and jumped back in uncertainty. Their Flyer foes were jousting for position as if the play was still alive.
To the lengthy list of life's unanswerable questions we offer the following: What takes longer -- the recovery of an NHL player who's been concussed by a blindside hit to the head or the NHL passing a rule to finally and officially penalize that hit?
Some thoughts heading into tonight's pivotal third game in the Western Conference Final:
Maybe it was just the emotions of a double-OT loss that led Lindy Ruff to lambaste the officials in the aftermath of Buffalo's Game 4 defeat, but expect the Sabres coach to preach a different sermon ahead of tonight's must-win Game 5.
NEWARK, N.J. -- Before the puck dropped on the Devils-Flyers series Wednesday night, New Jersey head coach Jacques Lemaire proclaimed: "Already forgotten. The playoffs are a new season."
Because necessity truly is the mother of invention, the Chicago Blackhawks are fortunate to have one big mother.
Currently, the NHL has three 40-goal scorers: Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and...Steven Stamkos.
VANCOUVER -- The funny thing was, Sidney Crosby really hadn't done much all game. No points. Only two shots on goal. A missed breakaway late in the third period when he pushed the puck too far ahead and left himself no room to maneuver against American goalie Ryan Miller. The 22-year-old Crosby hadn't scored a point in more than three games and had been a non-factor on the ice.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- The clock hadn't even ticked to :00 by the time the first pair of Canadian gloves hurtled into the air. The 15 players on the bench monitored the scoreboard clock to see when time officially ran out, because you couldn't hear the horn at Canada Hockey Place. You couldn't hear anything but a nation exult, rejoice at realizing a dream: a hockey gold medal right before their eyes.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- With three minutes left in Canada's 8-2 controlled scrimmage over Germany, the raucous, red-wearing crowd at Canada Hockey Place began the chant: "We want Russia. We want Russia."
I don't have room to get into individual letters here, but a surprising number of you wrote regarding my column on the Capitals being jobbed in a controversial "no-goal" ruling at Montreal in which the Canadiens ended Washington's 14-game win streak.
VANCOUVER, B.C. -- Obviously they didn't tell the whole story of Canada at the Opening Ceremonies of the XXI Olympic Winter Games. A casual viewer of the pomp a week ago might have assumed these few acres of snow, as Voltaire once described New France, were populated only by dance-crazed native peoples and enthusiastic fiddlers. Clearly VANOC slighted the huge proportion of the Canadian population that is of Scandinavian extraction.
A Georgian luger was killed during Olympic practice. CNN's Mark McKay reports.
The Phoenix Coyotes are wards of the NHL, suspended like a bug in amber as the league seeks a remedy that is to the satisfaction of bankruptcy court judge Redfield T. Baum, a truly first ballot Hall of Fame name. (Redfield T. Baum ... hmm, Rufus T. Firefly, J. Cheever Loophole . . . I like to think Groucho Marx would have appropriated His Honor's name for one of his characters.)
CALGARY -- Mike Babcock eats breakfast like he wants his teams to play: rapidly and with an unmistakable sense of purpose. Although he does not have to be on the ice for another eight hours, Canada's 2010 Olympic team coach is wolfing an omelet at the 1886 Buffalo Café across from the team hotel at 6:30 a.m., bristling to get started.
The seventh game of the 2009 Stanley Cup Final has already been played in the recesses of minds and in recreation rooms and on driveways and rutted roads and in the temporary rinks that sprout in city parks during the northern winters.
As the curtain comes down on the regular season, here are my choices for the campaign's best, worst and most engaging performances, players, signings, moves and other esoteric categories.
Count on NHL All-Star Games to have end-to-end rushes, scores like football games, matador defense to rival any bullfight and enough bells and whistles to render the result thoroughly meaningless. But it takes a game in Montreal, during the franchise's centennial celebration, to provide something you would never expect to find ... drama.
5. The making of new friends. "The hospital was going to cost $14 million,'' the 42-year-old Dikembe Mutombo says.
In the first minute of Game 2 of the second-round Western Conference series between the Colorado Avalanche and the Detroit Red Wings, two men who have never shared a word but who always seem to share the same square footage on the ice collided in front of the Colorado net. Henrik Zetterberg, who plays left wing for the Red Wings, and Adam Foote, who plays right defense for the Avalanche, jostled and briefly raised their sticks before Foote gave Zetterberg a brisk whack on the hip as the puck left the zone.
A new study shows that gymnastics causes as many injuries as ice hockey or soccer, but improved equipment is helping
If the goal of the modern executive is a corner office with a view of the water, Joé Juneau is first-team all-Fortune. His office in the Kuujjuaq Forum, with its panorama of the village and the broad Koksoak River, offers a glimpse of the timeless and the temporary. Hunkered against the uncompromising elements of the stark and stunning Canadian subarctic, prefab Kuujjuaq, a town of 2,100 and the metropolis of the 14 villages dotted onto northern Quebec's vast Nunavik region, looks as though it could be packed up and carted off in half a day's work.
So NBC, the network that carries the NHL in the United States that you don't need a Sherpa to find, is Peacock proud of its new flex scheduling. That's a fabulous way to spin that it has dropped regional games -- that were siphoning off the bottom line -- in favor of a single national game.
Asked her hidden talents, the heiress, who shares a birthday with Michael Jordan and Jim Brown (Feb. 17), replied, "Shopping, ice hockey and cooking." (She said she was on the ice hockey team in boarding school.) Also, she and Nicole Richie infuriated fans when they let their dog run loose on a minor league field on The Simple Life.
SI.com: Just dessertsupdated: Sat May 19 2007 19:54:00
There is rough justice, frontier justice and administrative justice in the National Hockey League; but in a sport where the only stanzas are the ones that last 20 minutes, there was finally poetic justice.
MYTISHCHI, Russia (Reuters) -- Canadian players and officials defended Shane Doan at the ice hockey world championship after opposition parties demanded he be dropped as captain for allegedly insulting the country's Francophone minority.
MYTISHCHI, Russia (Reuters) -- Jaroslav Bednar scored with 68 seconds remaining to overcome a furious U.S. rally and give the Czech Republic a 4-3 win and top spot in Group B at the ice hockey world championship on Tuesday.
SI.com: A scary thoughtupdated: Mon Apr 30 2007 18:53:00
If you are of delicate sensibilities, or the parent of young urchins, you know that a sports event is not the best place to experience the kinder, gentler side of humanity. The shrieking foul-mouthed drunks, the beer showers, and the melees can make a day at the park feel like a visit to the bowels of Hell -- and those are just the athletes raising Cain.
SI.com: The prime numberupdated: Wed Apr 11 2007 12:36:00
There have, once again, been a series of serious soccer disturbances in Europe. In such disparate societies as England, Spain and Greece, the hooligans have been about their awful antics again.
SI.com: The Winnerupdated: Tue Apr 10 2007 09:53:00
One minute to go. A booming voice in Mellon Arena announces this, and the delirious crowd roars. Really, can a March night get any better? The fans arrived buzzing with the news that their beloved Penguins had been saved when a last-minute deal for a new arena locked the NHL franchise into Pittsburgh for the next 30 years. Then Penguins great, team co-owner and now savior Mario Lemieux walked onto the ice and declared how proud he was that the Pens "will remain right here in Pittsburgh where they belong!" And then the game: swift and furious, score after score, months of tension dissolving in the din. Now the inspired team and its dazzling star, Sidney Crosby, hold a 4-3 lead over the Eastern Conference-leading Buffalo Sabres; now the old building shakes with civic love and joy and the adrenaline rush that comes from fans knowing they'll be able to say, decades on, that they were there for that historic scene. A banner declares, it's a great day for hockey!
My recent column about the best American players in NHL history drew a number of responses.
SI.com: Ill-will ambassadorsupdated: Tue Mar 20 2007 12:38:00
"I believe I'm the best ambassador baseball has, because I'm constantly selling the game of baseball." -- Pete Rose on the Dan Patrick Radio Show
SI.com: Q&A: Howie Mandelupdated: Thu Jan 25 2007 16:37:00
Last week SI writer Richard Deitsch interviewed Howie Mandel [http://www.howiemandel.com/] for the magazine's Q&A. The 51-year-old actor and stand-up comic is the host of NBC's Deal or No Deal. Here are additional excerpts from their conversation:
SI.com: Red light specialupdated: Fri Jan 19 2007 13:39:00
It was a dazzling sign of how well things are going in Detroit these days when Henrik Zetterberg of the Red Wings scored one of those goal-of-the-year candidates against Nashville on January 17. Early in the second period, Detroit's left wing exchanged passes with his linemates -- center Pavel Datsyuk and right wing Tomas Holmstrom -- skated to the high right slot, pulled a 360-degree spin-o-rama that would have made Denis Savard envious, and slid a harmless looking backhand under the left pad of Predators goalie Tomas Vokoun, who reacted late after being befuddled by Zetterberg's acrobatics.
When players get hurt, they're often open to new medical technology that gets them back in the game more quickly and sometimes allows recovery from what used to be career-ending injuries.
Top Ghanaian skier Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong has just bumped into a couple of gates as he tears downhill over a tricky steep slope that makes up the grand slalom course at this resort in the Italian Dolomites.
Chanda Gunn's goal was to be in the goal crease for the U.S. Olympic women's hockey team, and she was not about to let epilepsy shut her out.
One billion people, one silver medal at the 2004 Olympics.
The new Disney movie "Miracle" may blatantly manipulate your emotions -- but it's still inspirational and completely compelling.
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